French photographer, member of the VU' agency since its beginnings, lives in Paris

First a press photographer, Stéphane Duroy gradually moves away from reportage to question the relationship between the 20th century Europe and its own history - scarred by two atrocious wars. His approach is both documentary and conceptual, with a sobriety of means that prohibits the spectacular as much as the anecdotal.

"From 1977 to 2002, I undertook a vast photographic survey of british society, whose marked social divisions illustrate the complexity of a human community.
From 1979 West Berlin emerged as the link between cause and effect, the place where were decided the major orientations which generated the European tragedy and called our dear values into question.
Finally, from 1984, the United States - as a magnificent symbol of hope, a great ready-made dream in which no one believes anymore - closed the circle.
Today, this obsessive journey forms a closed theatre prefiguring the chain of our behaviours : group survival, power and its struggles, failure, bitterness, rejection, flight, finally, a mixture of sincere hope and duplicity."

This profound and disillusioned reflection on a deaf and desolate Europe gives rise to an important corpus of monographs. In 2017, ten years after the publication of his book "Unknow", Filigranes publishes "Unknown #2 - The endless Reworking of a book", marking a formal evolution initiated in 2009: "Collages, press clippings, anonymous photographs, paintings, erasures and tears, come to feed and abuse dozens of copies of his book Unknown. By this daily gesture of destruction and reconstruction, by adding layers of successive materials, (...) this attempt to exhaust the book and his own images allows Stéphane Duroy to go beyond his photography, to break its codes and explore new territories of expression. (Fannie Escoulen)

Stéphane Duroy's work is part of prestigious private and public collections (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Maison Européenne de la Photographie) and is regularly exhibited, such as in »Collapse", a major retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2002, or "Again and Again" at the Bal (Paris) in 2017.

Portfolio

Series

Distress, United Kingdom (2011)

"This depiction of the human condition and its interminable frustrations, from boredom to despair to resignation, is a contemporary reflection on the profound injustices that left Europe mired in tragedy for much of the 20th century.
The rejection then of humanist values in a Europe blinded by fear led many to embrace abject totalitarianism.
Today, we are seeing a resurgence of this human tragedy. Whether it is experienced as solitude, joblessness, social exclusion, racism and anti-Semitism, such distress constitutes a threat to society when a minority of individuals gains access to knowledge, leaving the majority in ignorance and contempt."
Stéphane Duroy
(December 2010)

“Having decided to photograph West Berlin in 1979, Stéphane Duroy also wanted to understand Germany, the country that gave birth to Nazism, a unique phenomenon in History, generated by such a civilized nation. In 1989, ten years later, he took pictures of the fall of the Berlin wall. This year we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of this event. Stéphane Duroy, tracing history, asks how one lives in the present with knowledge of the past, and how does one mourn an event which will not occur again? This is what photography is, the elusive desire to hold back time.”
The book _Berlin_ is published by Filigranes Editions, 2009

The intent of this project after the tragedies that shook 20th century Europe was to envisage America as a land of asylum, a receptacle of the Old World's dramas and an optimistic transformation of the brutality and misery of its wars and revolutions. In the interest of focus, Stéphane Duroy has limited his field of investigation to New York, entry point to America, and the State of Montana, where the slow migration towards the unknown reaches its completion.

When I set out to photograph West Berlin in 1979, I wanted to understand how such a highly civilized people as the Germans could have created the horrors of Nazism, a phenomenon unique in history.
For ten years I was fascinated by this extraordinary enclave. The construction of the wall in 1961 meant that much of the city's history became frozen in time, turning West Berlin into a vast studio set where the past seemed as real as the present. In Cold War Berlin, the 2 faces of German civilization-one extremely refined, the other monstrous, could still be seen.
On November 9, 1989, the wall fell and the stage set collapsed-exactly fifty one years after the terror of Crystal Night.
By...

Second most important city of Poland, Lodz had for a long time owed its importance to the industrial economy development, textile among other. But, under the tricks of the Second World War, the city was practically totally destroyed, and the Jewish population was sent to concentration camps. Since that time, Lodz has never found again its past greatness. In the five next years, the city will lost its status of second town of Poland for Krakow. This is the story Stéphane Duroy is telling us. In the streets, empty of inhabitants, we feel that a nostalgic touch is here. Nostalgic for a city, and for a history which is loosing itself.

Taken between 1980 and 1990, this pictures series told two stories. The one of the end of a political system, of the fight between two blocks, and the one of the reunification of a city, of a country, and of a population. Deeply linked, those two stories are nevertheless clearly separated. This work proposes a travel between the end of an age and the beginning of a new one.

There are hats of course. Ascot hats and miners'helmets. There is coal, of course, and fish and chips and grey skies and public schools. Perhaps it had to be someone from the continent to be able to transmit the deep despair that has overwhelmed a country whose social and economic situation is probably one of the worst in Europe. Stéphane Duroy bears witness. But he particularly draws our attention to signs. Outward signs of riches and of tradition; those, more hidden, of bewilderment that is conveyed by faces, or by the unexepcted convergence of aristocrats after a party and of Mohican punks. Of course there are contrasts ; glances, glimpses of bricklined streets and of grey...

In 2007, Stéphane Duroy published Unknown, an anthem to anonymous rebels and people in exile. A few years later, he remade the book by tearing the pages of the original edition and once the new version was completed, he repeated this method over the years to make 29 different and one-off variations of the same book.

What is to be said about this disconcerting, dizzy-making challenge? A displayed desire to be always re-writing the same story, differently? Does it call to mind the quest for a truth and its opposite, supreme chaos? Does it have to do both with the exercise of an extreme concentration and an anarchic outcome? At the beginning and end of Unknown, there is a geography, on the one hand of Europe and its centre, Germany and, on the other, North America, pivotal continent, mealting-pot of exiles and dreams, graveyard of dashed hopes and failures. And as in all geographies, there are rivalries here between centre and periphery, between new world and old, and armies of proletarians and exiles who periodically go from one to the other. At the origin of Unknown there is also the everlasting recommencement of a story, deliverance and oppression, going beyond history and oblivion. Horizon and loss.

Once again, Stéphane Duroy went on the trail of tragedies that marked Europe in the twentieth century. Here, it is up to the surface the memory of Britain that he shot over 20 years. This book talks about the man, from childhood, the workplace and addresses subtillis death. The perfect rigor of framing, perspective said, scientists assays often pale light, a light winter, melancholy, we refer in the face image of a Europe that we tend to want forget very quickly.
This book is printed in 800 copiesText by: Stéphane DuroyPublisher: Filigranes Éditions (2011)48 pagesSize: 21,5 x 29ISBN :2350462099

The intent of this project after the tragedies that shook 20th century Europe was to envisage America as a land of asylum, a receptacle of the Old World's dramas and an optimistic transformation of the brutality and misery of its wars and revolutions.
Stéphane DuroyPublisher: Filigranes Éditions (2007)64 pagesSize: 24,5x34 cm

Coincidentally, Duroy happened to arrive in Berlin three days before the destruction of the Wall. Text by: Willy BrandtPublisher: Nathan (1990)74 pagesISBN :0-8212-1827-1

Grande Bretagne

Stéphane Duroy's England is that of a photojournalist, in the most demanding meaning of the word. Photojournalism which moves us because it is the true panorama of our time, hidden from us by the glitter and pomp of the Royal weddings beloved of the glossy magazines.
Christian CaujolleText by: Christian Caujolle, Philippe Ganier RaymondPublisher: Editions Temps de Pose (1987)128 pagesISBN :2-906063-03-7

Awards

Exhibitions

Within the framework of the festival L\'Oeil Urbain, in Corbeil-Essonnes, Stéphane Duroy displays his series Distress, shot in the United Kingdom.
\"This depiction of the human condition and its interminable frustrations, from boredom to despair to resignation, is a contemporary reflection on the profound injustices that left Europe mired in tragedy for much of the 20th century.
The rejection then of humanist values in a Europe blinded by fear led many to embrace abject totalitarianism.
Today, we are seeing a resurgence of this human tragedy. Whether it is experienced as solitude,...

Leica selected thirty photographs from the photographer\'s work, realized between 1979 and 2002 and exposed in the logic of the artist. Voluntarily, there is no date or place, to dive into the repetition of the European history of wounded by conflicts, in the United States, land of exile where migrants hopes fail. A simple statement. Here and there, it is always the same story. Stéphane Duroy constantly tracks this history in which we are locked up ... Cleverly, his images do not allow us to locate, date, identify the shooting locations, to translate a universal disillusionment. \"dirty\"...

What if Stéphane Duroy’s work was an exile? After forty years of obsessive wandering in the footsteps of old Europe as far as the United States, Stéphane Duroy today seems pushed by a wind of renewal, towards a photographic praxis taken ever further from itself.
L’Europe du silence, a ground-breaking work embarked upon by the photographer in the 1980s, comes across as an attempt to set out to encounter great History. Constructed in a long-term movement, this series records the vision of man in search of his identity and the memory of an Europe shaken by two world wars and many different...

During Paris Photo, Leica Camera is presenting a new exhibition at which Stéphane Duroy involved. The works, during a residency at the GwinZegal arts centre in northern Brittany, look into the hidden nooks and crannies of our history – the echoes of a world silently disappearing, the heritage of a rural society that is fading away – using them to sound out the values that govern our contemporary societies.

The Mediterranean Center of Photography presents The Europe of silence and Corsica 1762, two exhibitions about the remembrance work and the European construction during the 20th century and Corsican identity, by questioning the traces of the past.
The Europe of Silence
Photographs showing a reflection about the post-war Germany during many years.
Corsica 1962
A personnal and an experimental esthetic approach on Corsican identity.
This double exhibition enlightens us about Stephane Duroy\'s photographic work and contributes to awaken our critical spirit on the world and the...

The intent of this project after the tragedies that shook 20th century Europe was to envisage America as a land of asylum, a receptacle of the Old World's dramas and an optimistic transformation of the brutality and misery of its wars and revolutions. In the interest of focus, Stéphane Duroy has limited his field of investigation to New York, entry point to America, and the State of Montana, where the slow migration towards the unknown reaches its completion.